Columbia Pictures
By Anya Stanley/Aug. 24, 2022 11:55 am EST
Nature took its course
Armed with this knowledge, watching the boys roughhouse in chest-deep water takes on extra-foul dimensions. And it didn’t end with Gordie passing out. In the same oral history, Wheaton describes going to a nearby mall with Phoenix, O’Connell, and Feldman after shooting the scene, and being turned away from the water slides “because they thought we had open lesions on our skin.”
“For the leeches scene, they said, ‘We’ve got a clean lake in the middle of the forest. It’s been made by us and it’s all movie stuff, movie water and movie dirt. We dug a hole, encased it in plastic and filled it up with fresh water.’ The thing they failed to realize was they built this at the beginning of the shoot and by the time we actually got to that scene, it was six weeks later and they’d left it there uncovered. It was no longer man made, as far as all the worms and the bugs and the leaves and the raccoons, they were all in there. Nature took its course.”
At least the groin-feasting leech didn’t explode like it did in the book.
